Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Hili: Look at this picture. Was I really washing myself with such speed?
A: Yes, you were because Malgorzata opened a can in the kitchen.
Hili: Popatrz na to zdjęcie, czy ja się rzeczywiście tak szybko myłam?
Ja: Tak, bo Małgorzata w kuchni otworzyła jakąś puszkę.
(Photo by: Monika Stogowska)
These are just three emails I’ve gotten in the last week. Plantinga-lovers are especially incensed:
“Fr. Aidan Kimel” commented on “The bland leading the blind: A conversation between Gary Gutting and Alvin Plantinga“:
Tom, you are quite right. Plantinga is a sophisticated philosopher and cannot be judged on the basis of an interview in which he is attempting to communicate his arguments at a popular level. Before ridiculing the man, one should first read, and understand, his substantive writings.
His argument about atheism vs agnosticism is a minor point–more important to philosophers than anyone else. Yet folks here are jumping on Plantinga as if he is guilty of extreme stupidity. Before making such a judgment, go immerse yourself in analytic epistemology. Only then will you be qualified to have an opinion.
I am personally not sure what to make of Plantinga’s free-will defense of theism, but since few on this blog have actually read what he has written–and what he has written on this topic is philosophically IMPORTANT–it really doesn’t matter. The ignorance of science geeks is astounding.
Personally, I am uncomfortable with Plantinga’s constant phrasing of God as “a” being. I can use this language, of course, but I remain uncomfortable with it, for reasons I have cited over at my blog: http://goo.gl/L723sJ. David Hart has written eloquently on this question, but the omnipotent Coyne has already dismissed Hart without even having read him.
The Father is wrong that I didn’t dismiss Hart without having read him. I dismissed what I discerned of his views in a summary of his article by someone else, but emphasized that I hadn’t yet read his book. I have ordered his book and will read it. But I have to say this—I don’t think, based on other things I’ve read, that Hart makes a slam-dunk case for God. Hart’s book is just the next in an endless line of references that theologians present you, sequentially, as “the best arguments for God.” When you find flaws in one, they simply proffer another. It’s like the mythical hydra: when you knock off one head, another crops up.
There must be a name for this kind of strategy, one that mirrors the “first cause” argument.
****
“mmanry,” who cited the website Life Bible Kids, also commented on “The bland leading the blind: A conversation between Gary Gutting and Alvin Plantinga“:
“Second, why is Alvin Plantinga famous, or even have a job? The arguments he makes are so palpably foolish that any freshman philosopher can see through them. Yet thousands of Christians regard him as a guru.”
Jerry, you prove over and over again that you really don’t have any understanding of Plantinga and philosophy at all. Why is it that you believe that you are the “enlightened one” and Plantinga is not? Even Thomas Nagel agrees with Plantinga on certain points. Let’s be honest, I think most people would trust Nagel over you in a philosophical debate any day. Stick to biology.
______________
In response, let me just list a selection of things I’ve read by Plantinga:
Dennett, D. C., and A. Plantinga. 2010. Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? Oxford University Press, New York.
Plantinga, A. 2000. Warranted Christian Belief. Oxford University Press, New York.
Plantinga, A. 2001. When faith and reason clash: Evolution and the Bible. Pp. 113-145 in R. T. Pennock, ed. Intelligent design creationism and its critics: Philosophical, theological, and scientific perspectives. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Plantinga, A. 2011. Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Plantinga, A., and J. F. S. (ed.). 1988. The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader. William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI.
Plantinga, A., and N. Wolterstoff. 1991. Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN.
I think that qualifies as a decent background in Plantinga. And really, he’s not hard to understand. He’s just hard to swallow.
I might add that real, card-carrying philosophers violently disagree with Plantinga, and in fact Nagel is an outlier. See, for instance, Dan Dennett’s evisceration of Plantinga in their jointly-published book cited above.
***
Finally, “George”, who cited an Anti-ageing website, commented on “A new year of creationist nonsense“:
“Did the Civil War happen? You obviously weren’t there to see that…”
No, BUT we have written accounts of the event from people who WERE there! This then is a weak argument.
There are no written records from millions of years ago, and the fossil record can and will be interpreted in a way that will protect the evolutionists theories.
Evolutionists always invoke “creationism” and religion, when making their arguments, as if the only reason ANYONE would challenge macro-evolution is a on a RELIGIOUS basis.
That assertion is totally false! Evolution (macro-evolution) can and should be challenged purely on a scientific basis. How else COULD it be challenged?
We need to get beyond the nonsense that all sorts of dire things will happen if people do not believe in macro-evolution.
Medicines would not suddenly cease to work, genetics and biology would no more be threatened by a valid refutation of macro-evolution, than physics was destroyed because quantum physics supplanted Newtonian physics.
Macro-evolution is scientific dogma, and is defended by the scientific establishment, just as religion defended their concept of the Earth as the center of the solar system before Galileo proved it incorrect.
The difference is that science doesn’t burn you at the stake if you disagree, and I concede that for the evolution heretics, that is of course a very big difference.
________________
There’s not much to say about this except to show once more the obdurate and willful ignorance of creationists. We have tons of fossil “transitional forms” that testify to “macroevolution,” which is a nebulous term roughly meaning the evolution of one “kind” of plant or animal into a different “kind”. But under anyone’s definition birds and reptiles are different kinds, and we have the transitions from the latter to the former. Ditto for reptiles and mammals, fish and amphibians, amphibians and reptiles, and terrestrial artiodactyls (even-toed mammals) into whales. To argue that we interpret the fossil record “in a way that will protect the evolutionsts [sic] theories is to argue that evolutionists (including the religious ones!) are in some kind of conspiracy to protect a flawed theory. But why would religious scientists like Ken Miller, Francis Collins, and all the folks at BioLogos do that?
The “we weren’t there to see it, so it didn’t happen” argument against evolution is becoming more and more popular. It behooves all of us to understand how it’s refuted by the data.
~
by Matthew Cobb
Over at preposterousuniverse.com, Sean Carroll has posted videos of his debate with William Lane Craig at the 2014 Greer-Heard Forum. Here’s the whole event for your delectation (the first 10:30 minutes are ads, so you can skip them):
h/t Dan McPeek
I’ve considerably rewritten my piece on Whole Foods and the pseudoscience of the left, which has been published in The New Republic as “Why do liberals tolerate pseudoscience at Whole Foods“? Just FYI. Give them a click for the traffic.
Hili: I can’t work this way!
A: So get a laptop.
Hili: No, I will be your laptop.
In Poliah:
Hili: W ten sposób ja nie mogę pracować!
Ja: To weź laptop.
Hili: Nie, ja będę twoim laptopem.
(Zdjęcie: Monika Stogowska)
Here’s an overview of the glass flower exhibit (3,000 specimens, not all on display). It’s called the Ware Collection after the Blaschka’s patron, Elizabeth Ware:
Some leaves. Note that none of the flowers or specimens were painted; they were all made using different colors of glass.
A cactus:
A diseased apple (isn’t the realism marvelous? They are extremely fragile and had to survive a boat journey across the Atlantic):
Can you identify these?
Some Irises:
As I said, these were made for teaching specimens at Harvard. In New England, the opportunities to learn what many plants and flowers looked like, was previously limited to dried, brown herbarium specimens. The Blaschkas’ work changed all that, but also gave us one of the most remarkable achievement of humanity.
Just to show you how crude their tools were, here’s a reconstruction of the Blaschka’s workbench. They didn’t even have a Bunsen burner:
If you are in Cambridge or Boston, this collection, which is part of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, is something you shouldn’t miss. It’s a Professor Ceiling Cat must-see!
I am a big fan of the history of science—not because it’s helped me do better science (though some of my research, including that on “Haldane’s Rule,” derived from papers that were largely forgotten). I think that it’s interesting to understand the history of one’s discipline, but not essential for practicing good science.
Alejandra Dubcovsky, an assistant professor of history at Yale, thinks that it’s essential for scientists to study history (she doesn’t specify what kind of history, or if she means the history of science), for another reason: because it gives us scientists “a sensitivity that only the humanities can teach.”
Or so she maintains in a new piece at The Chronicle of Higher Education, “To Understand Science, Study History.”
Like the reader who sent me the link, Dubcovsky seems not only defensive about her discipline, but stretching a bit to make her point. To show how history informs our scientific sensitivities, she uses the examples of Rosalind Franklin, which will teach us that science is not gender-blind (she says Franklin is “largely forgotten,” which is simply untrue); of Rebecca Skloot’s wonderful book about Henrietta Lacks (donor of the HeLa cells), which should teach us that science and race have an “uneasy history;” and about Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb, which should teach us that “we find deep, sometimes unforeseen, and often devastating consequences, even from the most theoretical of projects.”
Well, you learn this not from history (what history course outside of science even covers these topics) but from history of science courses. Indeed, most of us know these things without even having taken a course in the history of science. (I didn’t.) The correspondent who sent me the link (a woman) also made the following comments:
Man, the humanities sure are on the defensive these days, eh?
Well, yeah–all that context is interesting and important–but where are the data showing any scientists are ignorant of it? SO sick of these strawman arguments…Dunno about you, but I learned all this stuff in science courses–and plenty more! (Of history, science-related politics, etc.)
Why do these people have to be so loftily condescending?
Indeed. And as for this statement in Dobcovsky’s piece:
Teaching history to students who plan to be doctors, scientists, or engineers forces them to lift their heads beyond the lab bench or the clipboard and realize the greater social, economic, and racial contexts in which their training plays out. It gives them a sensitivity that only the humanities can teach.
Well, I find that even more condescending. It assumes that all of us are totally ignorant of anything beyond our immediate research. Try to find a Ph.D. in genetics who can’t talk about Rosalind Franklin, or a Ph.D. in physics who doesn’t know about Oppenheimer’s statement, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” when he watched the Trinity explosion.
But even if that were true, it’s simply false to claim that only humanities can teach sensitivity. What about interacting with other people outside academic courses? Do people who don’t go to college, and lack those history courses, also lack sensitivity or awareness of racial and gender inequalities? I don’t think so. You don’t need history courses to see the dangers of technology or the marginalization of women in science. And if you’re a working scientist, you’re almost surely well aware of these things.
No, Dobcovsky is simply trying to defend her discipline by saying that scientists need it. Well, I see great value in the humanities, for it enriches our lives, but her examples of the importance of history don’t buttress her argument.
Gary Gutting has partially redeemed himself after his recent execrable “discussion” at the New York Times’s “Opinionator” site with his Notre Dame colleague Alvin “Jeus Is a Basic Belief” Plantinga. (More on that later; I’ve recently gotten several comments from irate readers defending Plantinga and claiming that I’m totally unqualified to pass judgment on his silly statements because I haven’t read his books [WRONG] and am not a professional philosopher, either.)
Gutting’s sequel, however, is a nice interview with Louise Antony, described as ” a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the editor of the essay collection Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life.” In the video interview below, Antony describes herself as an erstwhile Catholic who began to abandon her faith when she didn’t get good answers to her questions from her Catholic teachers. Plato’s Euthyphro dealt her Catholicsm the death blow. (Philosopher without Gods is only $11.40 at Amazon in paperback.)
In the interview “Arguments against God,” Antony pulls no punches, claiming that she’s an atheist because she “claims to know that God doesn’t exist.” That’s a strong statement, but by “know” she doesn’t mean she has “absolute” knowledge, but rather sees sufficient evidence to conclude that God doesn’t exist—in the same sense that she concludes there are no ghosts.
When I started the interview, Antony was so cogent that I thought, “Wow! A new Horseman.” (I guess the correct word is “Horseperson”.) But things began to get a bit fuzzy and convoluted toward the end of the interview, so my enthusiasm was tempered a bit. Nevertheless, Antony is an articulate spokesperson for nonbelief and deserves a wider audience. I hope to see her at future secular and atheist conferences.
Here are a few of her statements from the interview:
Indeed; I have never seen a satisfactory religious response to the problem of evil. When theologians (including Plantinga) tie themselves into knots over this problem, which so palpably argues against an omnipotent and beneficent God, they show clearly their a priori commitment to defending their faith—regardless of the facts against it. And that, in turn, shows that apologetics is not a search for truth, but an attempt to justify by all possible means what you want to believe in the first place. Theodicy should be an embarrassment to theology.
Gutting, nonplussed, gives the only response he can: everyone still believes in at least “a supreme being who made and rules the world.” But that, of course, isn’t true, either. Antony takes him down:
Toward the end of the interview things go a bit downhill as Gutting and Antony discuss why anyone should care about the theism of others. To me, the answer is obvious: theism gives rise to moral and social policy that is not only inimical, but would not exist in the absence of God-belief. (Widespread opposition to abortion and gay rights, as well as the oppression of women, are part of these policies, although of course some of this would still exist in the absence of faith.)
But instead of noting that, Antony argues that theism doesn’t really matter except insofar as it’s essential to defend policy statements and their underlying morality. This leads her into this exchange, which I find unsatisfying:
L.A.: No one needs to defend their religious beliefs to me — not unless they think that those beliefs areessential to the defense of the policy they are advocating. If the only argument for a policy is that Catholic doctrine says it’s bad, why should a policy that applies to everyone reflect that particular doctrine? “Religious freedom” means that no one’s religion gets to be the boss.
But usually, religious people who become politically active think that there are good moral reasons independent of religious doctrine, reasons that ought to persuade any person of conscience. I think — and many religious people agree with me — that the United States policy of drone attacks is morally wrong, because it’s wrong to kill innocent people for political ends. It’s the moral principle, not the existence of God, that they are appealing to.
G.G.: That makes it sounds like you don’t think it much matters whether we believe in God or not.
L.A.: Well, I do wonder about that. Why do theists care so much about belief in God? Disagreement over that question is really no more than a difference in philosophical opinion. Specifically, it’s just a disagreement about ontology — about what kinds of things exist. Why should a disagreement like that bear any moral significance? Why shouldn’t theists just look for allies among us atheists in the battles that matter — the ones concerned with justice, civil rights, peace, etc. — and forget about our differences with respect to such arcane matters as the origins of the universe?
The statement that ontology doesn’t lead to difference in morality seems naive. If you adhere to different scriptures and see different Gods who mandates different things, and think that God’s will helps define morality, then of course differences in ontology will bear moral significance.
So I don’t agree that “religious people who become politically active think that there are good moral reasons independent of religious doctrine.” Granted, they may, when pressed, not think that those moral reasons come from God, but they would, at bottom, justify their morality as what their religion teaches.
In other words, Antony fails to connect religiously-based morality with the social policy that derives from that morality, and so doesn’t appear to see the harm that derives from religion. In that sense she’s not really a New Atheist.
But she is smart and articulate, and I’m going to read her book.
You can see a three-part Vimeo interview with Antony here.